Survey: Unwanted Births Up, Reason Unclear

Ok, kiddies, this is a lesson in how to prevent your brain from being manipulated.

Take the headline above. It's from those drooling uber-nazis at Fox News, but almost every outlet carrying the AP story had a similar headline. Let me walk you through it to show you what Your Humble Servant is getting at. All the emphasis added below is my responsibility.


More American women are having babies they didn't want, a survey indicates, but federal researchers say they don't know if that means attitudes about abortion are changing.

"Didn't want"? That implies the babies are wanted now, doesn't it? Sorry for the aside. On with the show:

U.S. women of childbearing age who were surveyed in 2002 revealed that 14 percent of their recent births were unwanted at the time of conception, federal researchers said Monday.

In a similar 1995 survey, only 9 percent were unwanted at the time of conception.

Bingo! Read the two previous paragraphs again and then check the headline. Unwanted births? No, unwanted pregnancies. Is the phrase "unwanted at the time of conception" difficult to understand? The story makes this a little more clear but think about the headline and the message it is trying to convey.

(View the Complete Report in PDF format. It's 9.9 MB.)

Anyway, this story actually does have good news for those of us who have not made murdering children our goal in life.

At least one anti-abortion group said the numbers reflect a national "pro-life shift," while others who research reproductive health issues suggested it might mean less access to abortion.

Either way, that's good news.

The latest findings are consistent with the falling rate of abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based nonprofit group that researches reproductive health issues.

Nope. That's not what they are. Think of Herr Alan Guttmacher's (A German! We all know what that means, don't we kiddies?) Institute as Big Babykilling's think tank.)

In 1995, for every 100 births that ended in abortion or a birth, almost 26 ended in abortion. In 2002, 24 ended in abortion, according to Guttmacher data.

That information seems to be in synch with the federal data released Monday, said Lawrence Finer, Guttmacher's associate director for domestic research.

"The two statistics together suggest — but don't confirm — that a greater percentage of unintended pregnancies resulted in births rather than abortions," Finer said.

Yippee!

The Guttmacher Institute is nearly finished with a study of that question, but Finer declined to discuss the results before they've been published.

I can't wait for the spin on that one, kiddies.

Others feel the link is clear-cut.

"I don't think there's any mystery here," said Susan Wills, of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The new data underscores that more women are turning away from abortions, even when it's a pregnancy they don't initially want, said Wills, associate director for education in the Conference's Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities.

"It shows a real pro-life shift," she said.

More women may be carrying pregnancies to term because of increasing availability of ultrasounds and other information that show "it's a baby from an early time," Wills said.

Makes sense to me.

Finer suggested the shift may reflect not only a diminishing demand for abortions, but also a decline in abortion providers, Finer said.

The number of U.S. abortion providers fell steadily in the last decade, from 2,400 in 1992 to 1,800 in 2000. The reason is not clearly known, although increasing government restrictions of abortions have made it increasingly difficult to provide the procedure, Finer said.

Yippee! 600 down, 1,800 to go! Go get 'em, kiddies. These psycho Kindmörders are in the book, after all.

The new data on unwanted pregnancies was released by the National Center for Health Statistics, which surveyed 7,643 U.S. women on that and many other family planning and reproductive health questions in 2002 and early 2003. The surveyed women were between the ages of 15 and 44.
Among the questions: "Right before you became pregnant, did you yourself want to have a baby at any time in the future?"

If they said no, the pregnancy was defined as "unwanted." Pregnancies that occurred sooner than the woman wanted were instead classified as "mistimed," said Anjani Chandra, lead author of the federal study.

Federal researchers don't know if the survey reflects a societal shift in attitudes toward abortion, Chandra added. "People have all kinds of attitudes that don't always reflect what they choose to do. We would never want to guess at people's attitudes based on their behavior," she said.

What? Since when? Fools like you do that all the time when it suits your purposes. Whom are you trying to kid, madam?